You Can Market a Kauai Vacation Rental. You Can’t Manufacture the Buyer.

There is one thing I cannot do when selling a vacation rental property, and neither can any marketer.

I cannot manufacture a buyer who is ready, willing and able to purchase that particular property, at that particular price, on the seller’s preferred timeline.

I wish I could. And recently, I got a very clear reminder of exactly why I can’t.

A Seller Who Wanted More

One of my sellers has a vacation rental condo that has been on the market for a couple of months. In residential real estate, a couple of months can start to feel like a long time. In the Kauai vacation rental condo market? It’s practically dog years in reverse. Two months is nothing.

The property was already fully marketed, but my seller was getting anxious about the timeline. He personally knows an experienced marketer who works with a residential real estate development team in another part of the county, so he decided, at his own expense, to bring his friend in for another layer of marketing: a separate website, advertising and an additional campaign.

I was all for it. More exposure certainly isn’t going to hurt.

The Zoom Call

The three of us got on a Zoom call, and his marketer friend asked all the right questions. Where are the buyers coming from? Who owns in this complex, and why do they buy? How do they use the property?

These are things I know, and I had the data to back it up. Interestingly, my data lined up pretty closely with research he had already done on his own.

What he hadn’t thought to look into was days on market for vacation rental condos.

When I showed him those numbers, he was surprised, and he said so. That’s when the difference between his world and mine became very clear.

Two Different Buyers, Two Different Sales Cycles

He’s accustomed to marketing residential developments, where homes are primarily being sold to people who need somewhere to live. That buyer has a reason to move forward. A lease is ending, a job is starting, kids need to be enrolled in school.

A vacation rental condo on Kauai is an entirely different buyer and an entirely different sales cycle.

“Under Contract by Next Month”

At the end of the call, my seller looked at his friend and said, “Okay, so I want the property under contract by next month.”

That was quite a moment.

Because wouldn’t that be nice?

If I could build the right website, run the right ads, make the right videos, spend enough money and say, “Okay. Next month it is,” believe me, I would. So would his friend.

But that’s not how this market works.

What Marketing Can (and Can’t) Do

Marketing absolutely matters. My job is to make sure a property is:

• Positioned correctly
• Presented well
• Put in front of the people most likely to buy it

What marketing can’t do is create urgency where none exists. A vacation rental is a discretionary purchase.

A buyer can love the property. They can afford the property. They can be seriously considering the property.

And they can still decide not to buy it today. Instead, it might be 6, 9 or 12 months from now.

Markets Always Change

That is the fundamental difference in our market right now. It won’t always be this way, because markets always shift. But for sellers today, understanding the real timeline for a Kauai vacation rental is one of the most important parts of setting expectations and making good decisions.

If you’re thinking about selling a vacation rental on Kauai and want to talk through what today’s market really looks like, including actual days on market for your complex, I’m always happy to have that conversation.

If you would like to have Kauai Real Estate information delivered directly to your inbox every week you can sign up here: https://conta.cc/3scxsX4 

Aloha!

Lynda Gill RS Lic. 63088  

Hawai’i Life Real Estate Brokers 808.346.0056  

LyndaGill@HawaiiLife.com